The Abortion of the Conservative Coalition

...The culture has gone against the religious right during the past decade, so decisively that in this campaign even the candidate of the conservative grass roots, Ted Cruz, has generally abandoned the banner of the culture wars...

...Abortion is the live remnant of culture wars that have quieted, and so it can seem like an issue in search of a movement...

...That abortion now has only a small role in the debates over the future of the Republican Party suggests a turn away from a long history...

...By 1976, when the Republican Party included a proposal to ban abortion in its policy platform, the attachment between the Republicans and the anti-abortion movement was under way, and the religious right had begun to grow up around it. The influence of social conservatism over the Republican Party was complicated, and not without its tensions, but it supplied the Party with a zealous moral language, and a cultural idea to defend...

...For a quarter century, abortion supplied the Party not just with the conviction that it was the party of life but with its tone on social issues, a morally concerned paternalism.

This coalition now seems to be eroding both from above and below. The current instinct of the Party’s donors is often to muffle social conservatism...